2017 Virginia Tech Football Schedule

The Hokies are not scheduled to play a Thursday night game in 2017.

Virginia Tech is not scheduled to play a Thursday night football game in 2017. ESPN introduced its Thursday night football package in 1991, and the Hokies are tops in appearances with 32 games under their belt. Tech is 23-9 (71.8%) in such games.

Justin Fuente echoed the tradition and importance of a Tech Thursday night home game prior to the Hokies' eventual 37-16 win over Miami last season.

"Through the wintertime and into the spring and summer, my conversations with boosters or fans or people in the community always centered around how excited they were that we had a Thursday night home game this year and how they were anxious to show it off," Fuente said during an October teleconference. "It's obvious it's very important to people here. I'm excited to be a part of it. I have watched Virginia Tech play from my own living room many times through the years on Thursday nights, and I'm excited to get to be a part of it."

Tech did not host a Thursday night tilt in Lane Stadium during the 2015 season, and the last time the Hokies did not participate in an ESPN Thursday night contest was 2001.

"I've not been told anything about a Friday game, I was told last year that we'd like rotate out of that and hopefully we will," Babcock told The Key Play in January 2016. "We put in our annual request to ideally play a Thursday night home, so other than that, right now we're just saying Saturdays and a Thursday night home game. We'll see what the ACC gives us."

I'm happy about getting Clemson early in the year, but not for that reason. We have WVU week one with a new cast on offense, and they have to go to Louisville and face Lamar potentially before new faces on defense have gelled along with their new QB. So I think we both have a chance at a loss, but I do want Clemson early while they are also still adjusting to their new faces. That game could come down to which new QB has acclimated better to each team's offense.

hClemson plays @UL and home vs. BC the two weeks before us.
@BC plays Central Michigan at home the week before. Possible hangover game here.
hUNC has a bye at home. Apparently some guys that celebrate football festivals might be there. But we also have a bye.
hDuke is home vs. Pitt before us.
@Miami is @ UNC before us.
@GT has a home bye like UNC does before playing us.
hPitt is home vs. UNC before us, but it's a Thursday so they have 9 days between games.
And then we close with a bye in Charlottesville.

I'm not complaining too much about this schedule. Pitt has a couple more days of prep time compared to us and the GT matchup always makes me a nervous wreck, but it sets up reasonably well otherwise.

"That move was slicker than a peeled onion in a bowl of snot." -Mike Burnop

Thats probably because ole miss beat bama both years before that which has practically never happened to bama. You gotta think a lot of the steam has been let out of that matchup now that bama ended the "streak" right?

Will note that the ACC Championship aired at the same time as the Big10 Championship, which was projected to be much closer. But either way, that's an impressive draw for an early season match-up. Everyone wanted to see if lightning could strike 3x.

ITT: People trying to talk themselves out of liking Thursday nighters. If you still live near Blacksburg, Thursday night football games can make your freaking week. And once the Hokies take care of business on Thursday, you can enjoy the rest of college football Saturday's while knowing that.

It was a great experience for a student, and for people living in the Blacksburg area, I'm sure it still is. I still live close enough to where I can still make Thursday night games. But the lack of TV exposure, coupled with travel issues and recruits not being able to attend make it not as appealing. I remember back in the day watching VT Thursday night games (the only game on) and then having SportsCenter talk about it and show the highlights the rest of the night. Now, you are lucky to get 2 minutes of mention on ESPN before going back to endless NFL drama, what did Lebron's hairline do today, and other garbage. It's almost like the game didn't happen if you didn't see it.

Saturdays are reserved for college football in the fall. Way better to be playing then when the eyes of the nation are focused solely on that sport.

Yeah, I think being saturated with Tech football my entire life kind of makes Thursday night games not as special. I can understand why students here love them -- I had a 9:30 class on Thursdays last semester and it had a distinct smell of alcohol -- but it just isn't that big of a deal for me. I would rather have us play on the day that is "known" for college football.

Let me make this very clear, I'm going to need everyone at their absolute loudest and most raucous on 9/30 so I don't have to listen to all the Clemson fans (who are awful) talk about how unimpressive and overrated Lane Stadium is. This is their style when it comes to VT, subtle cut downs, treating our program like it's a little kid that occasionally impresses, despite having fewer ACC championships in my lifetime. <-- That is a simplified explanation of why I hate Clemson fans so much.

Until recently we were notably better in my lifetime (born in late 92) and now that they have the NC during my lifetime that pretty much trumps anything we had over them. Nobody cares we have more conference championships, wins, etc. They got the big one, and we don't.

I would much rather have Saturday games than Thursday games. We used to schedule those games to establish our place in the college football world. We were successful at that because it was the only game on TV. Now that there are usually 2 college games and also an NFL game, let the smaller schools have their time in primetime.

Agreed. Thursday is getting dangerously close to MACtion as far as TV exposure. It is not what it once was. Saturday games are way better for nearly every reason, other than for current students skipping class and tailgating on a Thursday.

2) Yeah, don't really care. It's just my opinion, and I get that it's in the minority. I've got the karma to take a few downvotes.

So what you mean is you are speaking the damn truth?

Nah, I totally get your reasons and they are valid. I just remember being a student and that my Thursday nights (GT David "Wiggleworm" Wilson) being highlights. You're gonna have a different perspective being from Blacksburg but those will always stand out. Hell, any night game will. Give me a Saturday night game. I just like games under the lights. It's me being a selfish fan.

Yeah, I think being saturated with Tech football my entire life kind of makes Thursday night games not as special. I can understand why students here love them -- I had a 9:30 class on Thursdays last semester and it had a distinct smell of alcohol -- but it just isn't that big of a deal for me. I would rather have us play on the day that is "known" for college football.

I follow a lot of national college football writers on twitter. After a Thursday night game, every one of them is talking about our game. And believe it or not, that kind of stuff matters with perception. On a regular Saturday we're lucky to get a passing mention. Thursday nights still offer better exposure for all but the best Saturday games.

I disagree. The Thursday night game provides a ton of great exposure for Virginia Tech and the football program, even if the increased competition for Thursday night football on other networks has diluted the exclusiveness.

The best way for Virginia Tech to leverage a Thursday night home game is to play its "worst" ACC opponent on Thursday night (most likely a rotation between Duke and Boston College), i.e. the game that would be the 12:30 Raycom special to maximize exposure. In the past, Tech's played among its most marketable home games on Thursday nights, which more approaches a detriment.

In the past, Tech's played among its most marketable home games on Thursday nights, which more approaches a detriment.

I still think we come out ahead. In the past 4 years we haven't had any games worthy of primetime treatment that didn't include Ohio State, by putting someone like Miami in the Thursday slot, people got to see how exciting last year's team was with an actual exciting game. Thursday nights are a guaranteed primetime slot with people watching, you want to showcase exciting football to entice people to come back and watch more (and convince media members we're worth covering). Throwing a BC in there just means most people tune out. Playing Miami means ESPN does a 10 minute segment on Enter Sandman.

While I do disagree, with your opinion let's be honest, we both have enough Turkey legs to the point they don't matter, especially you, we'd face the penalty box/banning before either of our leg counts would go close to negative.

"Hokie religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid." Han Solo

While I've been guilty of commenting a similar phrase earlier in life, I've gotten to the point where I find the phrase so cringy that anytime I see any variation on the whole "go ahead and downvote me" I've taken up a "bitch, don't think I won't" attitude towards it, even if I agree with the opinion. I'm pretty sure reddit/imgur did that to me.

"Hokie religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid." Han Solo

I wouldn't have done it if "Full Arnie" wasn't a full fledged TKP meme. I don't want to go around the TKP forums posting inflammatory garbage and daring people to downvote me on purpose because I have legs to burn.

You're good dude, I saw the Arnie incident. More of a site wide comment on how I don't want to see it as much as I see the Lawson transferring meme. At some point if you say bro too much, you go from satire to just being a bro.

"Hokie religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid." Han Solo

But in all seriousness, we've played at MAC schools several times which isn't much different. Arkansas State is in the Sun Belt, but they're at the top of that league and have been to 6 straight bowls, which is the 20th longest streak in the country. They've become competitive by doing a pretty remarkable job with their head coaching hires-- since 20011, their HCs have been:: Hugh Freeze, Gus Malzahn, Bryan Harsin, and Blake Anderson.

Meanwhile over at le sabre this is how they are viewing the William & Mary game....

It would be a big win for us contrary to what most folks think about playing FCS schools. Otherwise, a loss would be devastating like last year. We need to look at this game as though we are playing the Hokies.

This is no joke. If UVa wants to be considered the fourth best football program in the state, they have to beat W&M.

If they could beat W&M and Richmond in the same year, they could claim to be the third best football program in the state. That would be a big step up for Bronco. Could help him on the recruiting trail.

"Our job as coaches is to influence young people's lives for the better in terms of fundamental skills, work ethic, and doing the right thing. Every now and again, a player actually has that effect on the coaching staff." Justin Fuente on Sam Rogers

I kind of wish we had a warmup game before WVU. I think we end up being the better team, but the question is whether our presumed redshirt freshman QB will look sharp in his first game on the big stage.

Not to single you out, but when you don't know which thread a comment belongs in, start a new dang thread, because it most certainly doesn't blend with the discussion about the 2017 football schedule. I will delete this comment in a few minutes, hope you see it before then and opt to start a new forum topic on a subject that merits some discussion.

coaches yes. Do players really want to make an impression on the croots? I really doubt they care about them, but I'm sure they don't want to be embarrassed. Everyone from the 757 wouldn't hear the end of it from their friends and family.

I'm with ya on that worry. Easy looking ahead game and ODU might be a better version of the ECU teams we usually play (excluding last year). I'm sure they will also treat it as their super bowl the same way ECU does every year.

ODU hosts UNC the week before. If ODU makes it close against UNC then it's a warning for VT and if UNC beats ODU then it becomes a measuring stick game on how hard we can come out against ODU to make a statement to rest of ACC.

So I've never gone about getting season tickets before, but I damn sure want to do it this year. How does that process work for first-timers? Does it help that I started contributing to the HC this year? Do prior Season ticket holders get priority/claim all the tickets?

Since this is a home game, can we install rain machines over the field so long as it rains the entire game and not just when they're on the field, like last game.

Warning: this post occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)..

So looking around at some of our viewership over the years to see if it really is "Better" to get away from playing Thursday night games as they are slightly more crowded. To move to the far more crowded but traditional all Saturday games.

2013 VT Sat viewership average: 1.4mil for the ones nationally a total of 8 games headlined by the 5.2 vs Bama with 2.3 beaten just one other time when we got the ABC split vs BC, Iowa and Wics were the other game).

2013 Thursday Night Viewership: 2.3 - 1 game @GT

2014: Saturday: Avg 2.22 million, we had 5 games on national tv(excluding UNC, Duke, WMU, BC and WF). Including the lovely stretch of tOSU, ECU, GT with 4.3, 2.5, and 3.4 million got to see us peak and then implode.

Thursday: was not a banner year, avg of 1.29 over the two games including the Miami Massacre.

Friday: We drew 3.05 million for the UVA Black Friday game, unsurprised its back. Total non Sat avg is 1.87 million viewers.

2015: Oh Boy did Saturday viewership take a nose dive, 6 games got picked up for national tv. Avg across them was a lousy 800k! Now this average was harmed though by the exclusion of the massive 10.5 million that saw the Monday night Labor Day game vs tOSU..

Thus/Fri: since had one of each, and of course got to ruin GT's bowl streak on it and that good NCST game, the two games had an avg viewership of 1.5million. Nearly double the weekend views.

2016: Saturdays get a good deal better which shouldn't be shocking along with help from Bristol, ND, and an ABC split for the BC game. The average across 8 games picked up was 1.6 million. However it should be noted that 5 of them never got more than 500k.

Thursday looked actually basically the same, the two games averaged out to 1.6 million.

So over the last few years our Avg Sat viewership nationally has been about 1.5 million. Now note that that number is not waited at all for how many games even got picked up, just all 4 years added and averaged.

For Thursday and Friday nights its been about 1.8mil.

So it seems to me that the data would absolutely suggest keeping regular Thursday night games in the lineup. They are the safe bet to draw around 1.5 million, so in line with the average over the last 4 years. Sure you get a few Saturday games with more eyes, but even the best teams not named Bama or tOSU have trouble keeping that up, and mixed in are load of snoozers even the best of use have trouble watching at times. While even against teams with demonstrably smaller or less engaged fan bases like GT and Pitt when VT is on it is a great, viable Thursday Night game.

It's all about the network. A game on ESPN on any night of the week will get more viewers than a game broadcast on ESPNU. ESPNU is not standard in most cable packages, so anytime we are assigned there (as we were multiple times this season), the viewership is going to top out at 400k. Even MACtion on Tues/Wed nights on ESPN2 gets higher ratings than Saturday ESPNU games.

Even in her "national role" she still managed to shit on VT via Championship Drive podcast leading ALL the way up to the week before the ACCCG. During one of her rants on us, she even used the line, "and listen, I want the ACC to be good given I cover them," to try to add validity to her argument.

Copied from here and edited a little for this season. I might as well repost this every year.

Dear ACC,

Thanks a lot for scheduling us on [date] against [team]. You really weren't thinking that one through, were you?

You know in Blacksburg we love [weekday] night games, particularly against [team] or [team], but you didn't even consider giving us even a little [emotion] , did you? You thought, 'Oh, well we have [Blacksburg school] and we can schedule them against [team] on [date] if we want to, can't we?'. Yes, technically you can, but wouldn't you consider throwing [fanbase] a bone every now and again?

It's bad enough that we scheduled ourselves for [infinite time period] against [mid major from one state southward], but you won't even let us schedule [in-conference team with a Heisman winner] or [historical power in talent rich state] for at least another [infinite time period], instead forcing us to play yearly against [boring northern Catholic non-rival school], usually at [early game time].

At least we get to play [757 school] and against [school of deluded rednecks] next year and win our [infinite time period]th-straight game against [house of douchebaggery].

Warning: this post occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)..

Playing devil's advocate here because I just about agree with these, but why not have the Orange effect on the Clemson and supposed night game? I know their colors are Orange, but we could show them he "better orange" if you know what I mean. Also I think Orange effect games at night are better than Maroon Effect games at night (looking at you Ohio state game)

You put those words together, those are my favorite words, Popeyes and bahama
- Mike Burnup

I'm against a white-out night game purely because it's not our thing. PSU owns that and the last thing I want is to emulate anything PSU related, no matter how "insane" it might be.

Our primary colors are Orange and Maroon and I think we should stick with that. We did white-outs for Herma's Readers (which I fully support) but they were typically noon games vs ho-hum opponents and I was generally okay with that. Marquee Night Game Matchups deserve either Orange or Maroon IMO. And of the two, I prefer maroon because it's meaner looking.

Again they could replace it with a Black Out, which is also very menacing, although Black isn't one of our three colors. They basically had an unofficial Black out for the Battle at Bristol with the Hokie Stone jerseys. A Gray Out wouldn't work, would it? Gray would probably make more sense to me than a White out because of the Hokie stone influence and incorporation in the school

You put those words together, those are my favorite words, Popeyes and bahama
- Mike Burnup

And the sort of blackout at the Boise game in 2010 (which was the loudest game I have ever been to...couldn't hear shit the few days in the classroom)...so, definitely not against it. People get excited and riled up for different things like that.

That atmosphere was on par with the 2005 miami game (PREGAME ONLY) in my books. Place was packed to the gills, everybody was singing along to the PA prior to kickoff, Enter Sandman was dangerously good, and our ~80,000 fans there were absolutely deafening...just that last drive was my matt ryan moment (I wasn't at that BC game). Good memories all in all.

I've been at multiple games (a few in Lane, one in Lane North) where a Penn State fan sitting near our group has come up to us and said we made his day with the "We're Not Penn State" chant. Reinforces that we're doing the right thing.

We've never done an effect game where we share a color with the other team, and I think that's kind of the point. If we have Orange Effect against Clemson, how is that supposed to intimidate them at all? It'll just look like their home stadium.

So, no orange games against Miami, Clemson, UVA, or Syracuse
No maroon games against FSU or BC.

Ironically, the idea to start having effect games came from our game at Texas A&M ... because all their fans wore maroon.

I know I'm in the minority on this, but will add- when I travel to away games, I will pick between maroon/orange based on the home team's colors, but for home games, I've never honestly never understood why anyone worries about the visiting team's colors. Why do we need to pick our colors based on who is coming into our house? When we played at A&M, they wore maroon. When we play at Clemson, they wear orange. When we play at FSU, they wear maroon. When we play at UVA, they wear ties. (Ok, maybe that comparison doesn't work.) But for some reason we seem to get really wrapped up the colors of visiting teams in choosing what to wear in our own stadium. I don't care that much either way (and I participate in the maroon/orange/white effect games as designated), but it's always been kinda funny to me.

The schools you listed dont really have a secondary color though. aTm/FSU wouldn't likely wear white at home, Clemson only wears purple at home for their military appreciation game.

I see what you're saying, but for Clemson/VT weekends I will stay away from orange to eiminate any potential for being associated with Clemson. And when we wear maroon it's close to USCe garnet which makes them uncomfortable.

I cannot for the life of me understand why a Hokie would be opposed to a Thursday night game. I mean I get it if you had to decide between an entire season of thursday night games vs an entire season of saturdays. But to NOT want a single Thursday night game throughout the season...? I just feel like thats equivalent to being American and not liking freedom! The only valid argument I could see Is the added difficulty of getting to games on a weeknight. But even then, again were talking only one game in the season. Everyone is obviously entitled to their opinions,I guess Im just surprised to find so many people feel this way.